Unless you're raising your own meat and milk at home, hunting -- despite its brutality -- may be the best way to consume animal products.

It was nearly dark on the last day of my hunt, and I had just shot two does, a mom and her fawn, standing near each other. Mom heard the first gunshot but didn't know where it came from. As she looked toward her fawn, I shot her. After dating my last two doe licenses, I prepared to get to work.

I was more than a mile from my car, and the only way to take out two deer at once is to leave behind everything but the meat. This procedure takes time, and as the setting sun sent the temperature plummeting toward zero, I realized I couldn't find my headlamp. I'd be butchering in the dark. This can be especially treacherous when it's so cold you might not feel knife on hand. Luckily, the heat of the animals kept me warm.

The light disappeared as I was cutting off one of the does' hind legs. My knife nicked her udder, and milk poured out. Before I explain what happened next, two things:

Combine savage hormones with my burgeoning interest in comparative milk, then put me in front of a leaky deer and, well, I decided it was time for a snack.

First, ever since my son was born I've been paying a lot more attention to milk. For the second time in my life I've had the opportunity to sample human breast milk (it didn't do it for me like it used to). Meanwhile, in our search for alternatives to cow milk, which we find leaves a lot to be desired, I've become familiar with sheep and goat milk. And I've heard good things about camel milk, though I've yet to try it.

The other thing is that when you're pumped full of adrenaline and hunting endorphins -- I call them savage hormones -- you can enter a primal, wild space where you sometimes do things you might not normally do, like squeeze turds between your fingers to see how fresh they are. When you're cutting up an animal, your adrenaline is still peaking from the hunt, and the carnage can turn you into more of an animal than you already are. Many hunters encourage newbies to eat the raw heart of their first kill. Thanks to savage hormones, they often do.

Combine savage hormones with my burgeoning interest in comparative milk, then put me in front of a leaky deer and, well, I decided it was time for a snack. By the light of my cell phone I could see that the milk was pure white, not pink with blood. I leaned in and took a slurp from the lacerated udder. It was good. Really good. Even better than sheep's milk, which was previously my favorite. It was so good that I collected some in a clean Ziploc bag to take home for the kid.

(The next day, after my savage hormones wore off, taking deer milk home to my human baby began to seem strange, not to mention dangerous. And I had little doubt that his mom would veto the treat, so I tossed the bag.)

Many readers will find my field experiment disgusting, weird, and perhaps barbaric. But if you think milk from dairy factories is any less disgusting, weird, or barbaric, then you probably don't know much about where milk comes from. You've probably never heard the cries of a mother cow and calf when they're separated. The mom, her udder activated by pregnancy, is carted off to live out her biological prime in slavery, her body turned into a milk machine. When she's done producing, she gets turned into hamburger meat. The calf, depending on its sex, will either become a milk-machine like mom, or fattened into beef. Compare that scenario to the mother and fawn that lived wild, free lives, both spared the grief of losing one another. To me there's no comparison.

There are no easy answers when it comes to animal products. Our dualistic relationship with animals, especially cows, as both milk and meat providers, has proven especially hard to reconcile through the ages.

Jewish dietary laws have long forbidden the simultaneous cooking and/or consumption of milk and meat. Though nobody knows the logic behind this prohibition, it's generally considered to be based on a line in Exodus forbidding the cooking of a kid goat in his mother's milk. From there, it's just a few conceptual steps to a ban on cheeseburgers and separate dinnerware for milk and meat.

Perhaps the adjacency of milk and meat brings the inherent tragedy of consuming animals too close to home. It forces us to confront the fact that the animal murdered for burger once suckled a mother's breast. Maybe the segregation of milk and blood is meant to keep empathy out of the kitchen and help us preserve a measure of sanity as we eat our tasty, nutritious, mammalian neighbors.

I finished deconstructing my deer in the dark, feeling my way through the animal like a blind man reading Braille. I loaded the meat into a backpack, with additional sacks of meat slung over my shoulders, and hobbled to the rig with an extra hundred pounds on my back. My hands and clothes -- and milk mustache -- remained caked with blood while I drove back toward civilization to clean up.

Despite the brutality of hunting, I wouldn't have it any other way. Aside from raising your own meat and milk, this is the most honest way to consume animal products that I know of. Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, when you eat meat, you're party to a kill.

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In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that preceded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

In excusing his Arrested Development castmate’s verbal abuse of Jessica Walter, the actor showed how Hollywood has justified bad behavior for generations.

“What we do for a living is not normal,” Jason Bateman said in Wednesday’s New York Times interviewwith the cast of Arrested Development, in an effort to address his co-star Jeffrey Tambor’s admitted verbal abuse of Jessica Walter. “Therefore the process is not normal sometimes, and to expect it to be normal is to not understand what happens on set. Again, not to excuse it.” As Hollywood continues to grapple with widespread revelations of hostile work environments, institutional sexism, and sexual misconduct on and off set, Bateman insisted that he wasn’t trying to explain away an actor’s bad behavior—while displaying, over and over, exactly how his industry does it.

Bateman’s glaring mistake in the interview—for which he has already apologized—is how he rushed to defend Tambor from Walter’s account of Tambor screaming at her on the set of Arrested Development years ago. In doing so, Bateman defaulted to every entrenched cultural script of minimizing fault, downplaying misbehavior, and largely attributing Tambor’s verbal harassment to the unique, circumstantial pressures of acting—a process, he suggested, most onlookers could not hope to understand.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The bombastic legal adviser to Stormy Daniels is taking cues from the era of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky.

On cable news these days, there are very few people who have approached President Trump’s ubiquity. In fact, there is only one, and his name is Michael Avenatti. (Stormy who?)

Avenatti is not the first attorney to understand how the publicity game is played. Litigators are often like this: brash, aggressive, and sophisticated media manipulators. But Avenatti is the first celebrity lawyer of the Trump age, and it’s for that reason that he has become ultra-famous: Everything to do with Trump becomes, for good or ill, a star. And so it is with Avenatti, who in the public imagination has become not just “Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti,” but simply “Michael Avenatti,” and appears to live inside your TV set.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.